Monday, August 23, 2010

Security Mitigations for Return-Oriented Programming Attacks

With the discovery of new exploit techniques, new protection mechanisms are needed as well. Mitigations like DEP (Data Execution Prevention) or ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization)created a significantly more difficult environment for vulnerability exploitation. Attackers, however, have recently developed new exploitation methods which are capable of bypassing the operating system's security protection mechanisms.In this paper we present a short summary of novel and known mitigation techniques against return-oriented programming (ROP) attacks. The techniques described in this article are related mostly to x86-32 processors and Microsoft Windows operating systems.